


Contradiction

by Leamas



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Rapist Takes The Form Of Victim's Loved One(s), Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 08:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20991956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: After killing both Dane twins, Kell goes in search of Lila, only to find that she's suffered at the hands of Astrid in a way that's a lot more complicated than he could have expected.





	Contradiction

Kell didn’t want to stay any longer in this world, knowing the inherent risk of doing so, but for that reason he couldn’t leave Lila here, either. He didn’t know if it would be possible to bring her home with him, having sent both halves of the stone through to Black London with Holland, but there was another possible outcome that stuck too close to the heels of the option of losing her between worlds, that Kell wanted to think about even less. Despite his best efforts, though, he couldn’t shake it.

If Astrid had come to him disguised as Lila, then it meant that they’d probably met. Knowing that alone said nothing about the state that Astrid left her in. Memories of Astrid were always too fresh. He’d never worked out which twin was worse, never liking either of them. Astrid was more fond of Kell than her brother was, but being favoured by the Dane Twins was not a desirable position to find oneself in. Tonight wasn’t the first time that he’d learned this. From his earliest memories of her, he’d known that she wanted to keep him, and he felt disgusting for having ever fallen into her line of sight. She’d teased, saying that one day she might not let him return home, but Kell had always known that she was serious, and that if she had her way then he’d be bound to her, like Holland was to Athos.

Now he had the memory of Astrid’s touch from within Rhy’s body making him want to recoil; the memory of his brother’s blood as he watched Astrid kill Rhy.

There would be time to think this over later, months and years stretching out ahead of him. Kell had finished what he’d come to White London to do, it wasn’t over yet. There was still Lila to find, and to bring home if he could. And there was still a mess waiting for him in his own London.

He traced his steps back to the throne room, where he’d sent Lila to finish Astrid and retrieve her stone. Stepping into the room, Kell was surprised to find how still everything was. After moving between worlds, Kell had a sense for the feeling of a place that was as clear to him as his sight and taste. How had he never noticed how ominous the room itself was? It was a forgivable oversight, he supposed, when he considered that every time he’d been here before had been in the presence of the twins. Now that they were gone, the silence of the room was no more comforting.

In the middle of the floor lay Lila, sprawled on her back. From this distance he couldn’t tell if she was breathing. Kell ran to her, dropping to her side.

“Lila!” he hissed, shaking her. Even in the empty room, he still spoke in a whisper. When she didn’t react, he grabbed her other shoulder and shook her harder. Her arm flopped down to her side, and for the first time he saw the blood on her face. In her hair. One shoulder speared through with her own knife. A steady flow of blood oozed from between her smallest finger and her ring finger on her other hand, where her hand was messily separated at the joint. But she still had a pulse.

He turned back to her face, pushing her hair to the side so that he could better see the wound. It didn’t look so bad—she’d been knocked unconscious, but she was so clearly not dead that Kell could only assume that Astrid had meant to come back for her. He could heal a wound like this.

“Lila,” he repeated. “You’ll be okay.”

He pulled his hand back, ready to draw blood, when Lila groaned. Although he knew that she wasn’t dead, the knot of dread that uncoiled in his chest was palpable when her eyes fluttered open, and she squinted up at him. Something about her gaze was different, in a way that he couldn’t immediately place. Her gaze was off, unfocused, dazed.

_It’s just her head_, Kell told himself, but the longer that he watched her the less certain he was of that.

“Lila,” he started to say.

*

_Lila…_

She groaned as she cracked her eyes open, and when she saw Kell looking down at her she wasn’t sure quite what to think. The last thing that she remembered was Astrid on top of her, her hand in Lila’s hair, then a bright pain exploding at the back of her head.

“Did you kill her?” Lila croaked as she tried to push herself up onto one arm. Kell’s hand landed on her chest, keeping her from doing just that.

“Don’t sit up yet,” he said. “You hurt your head pretty badly.”

“I’m fine,” Lila said, brushing him away with a wave of her hand. She didn’t sit up, though. “What about you? What happened?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“She looked like me when she left,” Lila said, the memories of Astrid’s shifting face now came back to her. The last thing that she saw before Astrid knocked her out was her own face looking back at her, her own sharp smile pulling her lips over her teeth. “She was going to find you.”

“Then she’ll still be looking,” Kell said. “Stay still.” He wasn’t looking at her face, but at the side of her head where her skull was pulsing something nasty. He was on her blind side, so she couldn’t see entirely what he was doing.

“So she didn’t find you.” Lila didn’t like to think that Astrid might be out there, searching for Kell, still wearing Lila’s own face. There were a lot of things about magic that didn’t make sense, but that Lila was willing to accept, but not this. It left a bad taste in her mouth, to think about this woman just replacing her.

She shook her head, trying to turn away from Kell. He stopped touching her, at least.

“What about Athos?”

It would have been too much to expect Kell to answer, apparently. Lila hit him in the leg, and when he looked at her she tried to take stock of whether _he _was okay. He could take care of himself and Lila knew it, having seen what he was willing to do.

_That’s why I’m worried, isn’t it? _She hadn’t seen everything that happened between Kell and Rhy—well, Astrid—but she’d seen all of the blood, and the state that Kell was in when she’d stormed into the room. He’d been beside himself with fear, and grief, and even if he hadn’t been so frantic Lila would have known better than to touch him, or to come near him at all. On their way to White London, he hadn’t seemed that much better, still distant. It was like part of him was staying behind in Red London, with his brother.

Now he looked… okay, surprisingly. It was a relief to see that he didn’t seem injured at all, and that something in his eye had cleared. Maybe he’d finished his business here, and so felt better for it. Relief, sometimes, meant more than even the sharpest joy.

“Kell?” Lila asked. “What about Athos? Are you going to tell me what happened?”

The sides of his mouth tightened, and Kell said, “We aren’t done yet. Can you see all right? Do I seem fuzzy to you?”

She shook her head, pushing his hand away from her. “Why the sudden interest? You don’t need to look after me. There are more important things to worry about.”

Kell just frowned, and Lila rolled her eyes. This time she didn’t let Kell try to stop her when she sat up, taking a moment to make sure that everything actually _was _alright. The room wasn’t spinning; there were no black spots in her sight. That was good, at least. This wasn’t the first time that she’d taken such a hard blow to the head, and if she wasn’t being ill then she was already in a better position than she had been in the past.

“What are we going to do now?”

“We’ll have to find Astrid. As I said, we aren’t finished yet,” Kell said. “We’re going to want to get out of here fast. It isn’t safe to just be sitting here.”

“Then let’s go,” Lila said. “Why are we wasting time?”

He was touching the side of her head, and she pulled away from his prying hand. She’d been telling the truth when she said that it didn’t hurt too badly.

As if reading her mind, Kell said, “You’re bleeding a lot, Lila.”

“It’s fine. I’m a fast healer,” she was saying as she started to pull herself to her feet, at the same time as Kell grabbed a fistful of her hair and slammed her head back against the floor, momentarily stunning her.

*

Lila lunged at him, her hands wrapping around his throat and her lips pulling back over her teeth in a snarl.

“I’ll kill you!” she shouted. “I told you that I’d kill you!”

Kell’s head cracked against the floor and flashes of white flashed across his vision. He couldn’t breathe, even beyond her hands at his throat. Couldn’t even think to try. Lila’s face hovered over his like the tip of a dagger ready to fall, snarling and hateful. He lay frozen beneath. It wasn’t possible. He knew that this could not be happening. Couldn’t even think of it. He wasn’t even here, but in the courtyard outside. With Astrid. With ‘Lila’.

How sure he’d been that it wasn’t her, as sure as he’d known anything.

But how well did Kell know Lila, anyway?

_I killed the wrong one._

Lila was snarling. After hitting his head he felt dizzy, the room less stable. If this was Lila he was less certain of it now, her features seeming to shift over him, and in her expression he saw a flicker of something dark twisting her features. _Astrid_, he thought, and wanted to sink back through the floor to vanish. To disappear forever. Her hands squeezed his throat tighter.

It was enough to pull Kell back to his moment. He reached for her wrists, pulling at her hands, but he didn’t get further than latching onto her before she grabbed a fistful of his hair and slammed his head against the floor again.

When she breathed, it sounded like she was the one struggling.

“I told you!” she shouted again, the words heaving out of her like she was sick with them. In the otherwise empty, silent room, they echoed. “I told you! As many as it takes!”

He grabbed her wrist, yanking her hand away from his head before she could hit his head against the ground again. Clumps of hair were pulled free, but Kell barely felt it. The room still felt like it was spinning, but the pain was real.

Lila tried to pull her arm away from Kell’s grip, but when she couldn’t pull her arm free she lunged for him instead. Kell grabbed her arm and used her own momentum he pulled her towards him. She brought up a knee and slammed it against his chest, knocking him back, but he grabbed Lila’s shoulders and pulled her against him instead. For a moment they struggled against each other, until Kell finally managed to pin Lila’s arm to the ground.

“Let go of me!” she shouted, an edge to her voice that cut the air like a knife. “I’m going to kill you!”

“Lila,” he said. “Listen to me. What are you doing?”

The rage in her eyes was unlike any that he’d seen before, a wild energy. But Kell felt how she tensed, her whole body momentarily frozen. He held her there for a few seconds, before quickly pulling his hands back and leaning away.

She angrily pushed her hair from her face but didn’t rise, as Kell knew she wouldn’t. Fights like these never lasted long. After the initial spark, it took a tremendous amount of strength to carry on in this way, and only a few seconds for whatever hatred saturated the air to vanish. As he stared at her, he felt his own strength drain from him, quickly replaced by exhaustion.

When he swallowed, he felt a lump form in his throat.

It wasn’t Astrid in front of him. It couldn’t be. Her violence was more controlled, crueller than the embodied blunt rage that had just thrown herself against him. And that was a relief, to know that the Lila he’d killed in the garden really wasn’t Lila after all, but any relief he felt was short-lived, even before Lila looked up at him with hatred dancing across her features.

“Lila,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“What the _hell _do you want?” He didn’t like seeing how she was looking at him: from the ground, folded over herself. He wished that he could tell himself that she wasn’t hurt that badly if she’d attacked him like she had, but he didn’t know that and he doubted that it was true all the same. It unsettled him, though, to see her staring through her curtain of hair like this.

“What happened?” Kell didn’t dare move closer or further away. His throat still hurt; he found himself reaching to touch it, but forced himself to fold his hand into a fist and rest it on his leg.

Lila laughed darkly. “Like you don’t know.”

“I _don’t_,” he said. He wanted to look away, just to not have her staring directly at him like that. “I was with Athos. And Astrid. When she found me, she looked like you.”

She pushed herself up, pausing as though noticing for the first time that her hand was hurt. That it was torn open.

The realisation hit Kell suddenly. “Did you think—”

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “But you were here. I think I know that.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Then asked, “What happened?”

*

Searing white pain flashed across Lila’s sight. Kell yanked her head back with far too much ease, dragging her back up to her knees before throwing her onto her back and pinning her there with his other hand. At first Lila tried for his wrist, digging her fingers into the fleshy part to force him to let go, and when that made no difference she clawed at his face. Kell snarled and backhanded her hard enough that she was stunned, but not so much that when he untangled his hand from her hair she didn’t roll onto her side to get away.

Lila did get an arm underneath her, enough to push herself off the ground, but that was as far as she got before Kell grabbed her other arm, dragging her back and then holding her against him. Neither of them had the upper hand at first, and as Kell wrapped his arm around Lila’s throat the first surge of panic ran through her. That she couldn’t breathe. That she was trapped against him, unable to get away. But she’d taken her share of beatings before; she’d fought her way out of worse. And this time, she wasn’t unarmed. Lila swallowed her fear, though, and reached for the knife tucked against her waist, driving it into Kell’s arm.

She heard him shout, and swear, and then he pulled his arm away from her. Lila leapt up to her feet and ran several steps, arming herself with another knife that she kept tucked up against her before turning back to look at Kell.

His expression as he pulled the knife from his arm was something that she’d never on anyone seen before.

“Why did you do that, Lila?” he asked, tossing and catching the knife a few times. She grimaced, holding tightly to her own knife, but before she could do anything with it Kell had brought his arm back and thrown the knife at her—and all Lila could do was raise her arm to try to pull out of the way, but it was no good.

As she watched, the knife seemed to change directions, curving towards her before finding its way into her arm.

Her knife dropped from her palm. Lila raised her hand, stunned, and then further stunned to see the knife stabbing both sides of her arm. Blood was already staining through her jacket, darkening it.

The pain hit her, then, as though she were winded. Lila reached for the gun that she’d brought with her, and raised her head to look at Kell, so that she could aim, but she got no farther than that before a force threw her on the ground. And then Kell was on top of her, one knee on either side of her waist and a hand on her wrist.

His face was twisted over itself. He didn’t look like he was smiling, but there was a curl to his lip and she caught a glint of movement in his right eye that made her want to tear it out. But she couldn’t. Just as the blood was bleeding through her jacket, pain bled into the rest of her and she couldn’t do anything but grit her teeth against whatever sound she was tempted to make as she tried to just _move_.

Kell leaned closer. He pushed her hair away from face, and of course it had to be on her blind side so she couldn’t see it. It didn’t matter—Lila swung out towards his neck, but he caught her wrist in the air and slammed it back against the ground, leaning closer so that his face was just over hers.

“Don’t do that,” he suggested.

“Fuck you.”

The side of his mouth twitched, then he buried _his _thumb in her wrist, hard enough to make her gasp, then twist against where he was holding her down. He’d made one catastrophic mistake, leaning over her like that—she drove her knee up between his legs, hard, and for her trouble tasted a mouthful of blood when he punched her. But she saw how he grimaced when he grabbed her hair again, dragging her head back.

Lila laughed.

“I’m glad you see the humour in this,” Kell said coolly, and she felt his breath against her neck. He’d had to let go of her hand to do it, though, so she could take a fistful of his hair and drag his head away from her. She could claw at his face, making deep gouges in his cheek as she aimed for his eye. And when he grabbed for her hand again, she punched him, hard, around the ear.

She hadn’t realised that he’d caught her wrist until the pain came, and when Lila looked up she saw blood smeared around his mouth.

*

At first it looked like Lila wasn’t going to answer him, the way that she continued to glare at him. The longer that she stared, the more unsettling it became, and the more aware Kell was of where they were sitting. The room wasn’t small, nor was the castle. He didn’t want to be here for any longer than he was, with the emptiness and the coldness creeping in around the edges of his vision. But he knew that he couldn’t force this conversation to move ahead any faster. He couldn’t force Lila to talk to him.

No, he’d have to untangle everything that happened before he could move. He wasn’t going to leave her alone here again, no matter how heavy the hatred radiating from her was.

Lila stared at her hand, and Kell saw for the first time just how bad the injury was. She didn’t pull it against herself, or even appear to want to protect it, instead holding it in front of her like it was something filthy.

“I came to find Astrid like you told me to. She was sitting there.” Lila nodded up to the throne, behind Kell, where they’d greeted him many times before. This room held too many memories, even now, and he had to shake each of them.

_Dead. They’re both dead now. Like Holland._

“And then?” Kell forced himself to ask.

“We fought. She knocked me out,” Lila said swiftly. “Before she left, she did something so that she looked just like me. Some kind of magic. I told you this.”

She frowned.

So that really had been Astrid that he’d killed, outside. Relief flooded through Kell. If he’d had more time, he’d have drawn it out for longer, after what she’d done. The memory of her filled him again, but he swallowed it down as best he could, again looking only at Lila and trying to forget everything else.

But just like he’d _known _that it wasn’t Lila who met him outside, he knew that whatever Lila wasn’t saying, he didn’t want to hear it. He thought of how she’d looked at him. He’d lose her if she stopped talking now. Why did that send his heart racing?

“I saw her,” Kell said. “She came to find me, looking like you.”

Lila glared at him. “And?”

“I killed her,” Kell said. “I knew that it wasn’t you, Lila. I just knew.”

“When I woke up again, _you _were there,” Lila said. “You told me that you’d killed Athos, but that you hadn’t found Astrid. Then you hurt me.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t it?” Lila demanded, and the same flash of anger ran through her again. “I told you that I would kill you for what you did.”

It still hurt when Kell swallowed. “You made a good try of killing me, it has to be said.” Her frown deepened. “That wasn’t me, Lila. You must know that.”

“How do I know?”

Because Astrid’s cruelty was calculated and controlled. It wasn’t like the Lila that attacked him. She probably sensed the same difference between how he fought her now, and whatever had happened before.

“Because,” he said, “if you really thought that it was me, then you’d still be trying to kill me.”

Lila looked away from him. Back to her hand. He thought she almost looked pleased with that, but he couldn’t tell. When she spoke again, she didn’t look away from the wound.

“Why should I believe you?”

Kell sighed. “Because I know Astrid. I know what she’s like, and how she likes to hurt people. I don’t know what exactly she did to you, but for her it wouldn’t be enough to just injury you. She wanted to make you afraid.”

*

Lila pushed against Kell with the hand that he hadn’t bit through, but it wasn’t enough to push him away. When he grabbed her hair and twisted her head to the side, she couldn’t stop him.

“Lila,” he said, moving his other hand down to the front of her jacket. There was barely any space between them now and when she tried to twist away, she couldn’t go anywhere. He unhooked the first button on her jacket, then the next, and then she felt his hand on her waist and she shuddered. When she tried again to move away from him, he wrapped his fingers tighter in her hair and leaned closer to her neck, close enough that she felt his warm, wet breath.

“Stop making this so hard.”

“Get off me.”

“Oh, Lila.” She felt when he laughed, his own chest moving against hers. She didn’t want him to say her name ever again. “Don’t be so shy.”

She screamed, then. Not from pain, or fear—she was above that—but in anger. His hand was still on her waist, moving lower now, and she felt Kell’s teeth graze against her neck. Felt his warm breath against her skin when he laughed, although she didn’t hear it. Lila’s wet hand grabbed at his, but she couldn’t make her fingers _work_.

“You don’t have to make this so _difficult_,” Kell snapped, dragging her head back as he did. The single note of humour had dropped away. “There. Was that so hard? Don’t start fighting again—Lila, stop _screaming_.”

Each breath was coming hard, fast. What noise spilled over wasn’t a sound she intended to make, and she glared up at Kell, wildly. Tried to trap his wrist within her own hand, but nothing was working. She could _see_ her hand now, enough so that she could tell that something was wrong with it, but that still didn’t explain why she couldn’t do anything. Why she couldn’t move. Who was she? This didn’t happen to her—people had tried in the past, but Lila Bard was _not_ so helpless that she would let it get this far.

Kell’s mouth found hers, and Lila froze. One of Kell’s knees pushed between hers. Nothing else existed, except the taste of him: heated metal and smoke and ice colder than anything she’d tasted before. When he pulled away, she tried to push back against him as hard as she could, but all that she was doing was bracing her bloody hand against his chest pathetically.

“You look so surprised,” Kell said. “Are you going to say that I read the signs wrong?”

A cold heat ran through her. Lila stared. Shocked. Like she didn’t understand. “_What_?”

“Don’t look at me that way.” He leaned closer and spoke against the hinge of her jaw. His breath was too warm; she was too cold. Lila knew that she had to move. “Why else would a pretty girl like you come all this way?” She could scarcely breathe, even knowing that she had to do something. _Why couldn’t she move?_

“No.” Even feeling his hand move down her body towards her trousers. Even feeling his cold hand move against the skin at the top of her leg, moving towards the inside of her thigh.

“We’re past that point now, Lila,” Kell said, and she could barely make sense of what he was saying now. “See? This isn’t so bad.”

*

“Is that what you think this is about?” Lila asked, finally. “Do you think I’m _scared_?”

Yes, he thought, but he knew that wasn’t the whole story. She wasn’t shaking in her skin. She was hurt, and betrayed—his stomach twisted up as he remembered why that was; that it was _he _who she thought hurt her. But he knew that she wasn’t afraid the way that he had been afraid of Astrid, once.

Before he’d come to understand her.

Before he’d come to _hate _her.

“She wanted to hurt you,” Kell said. “That was _all_ that she wanted.”

“What do you know about it?”

His eyes flit down to her hand, covered in blood. To the knife still stabbed in her shoulder.

“I suppose not a lot,” he finally said. “Lila—”

“Stop _saying _my name!” she snapped, suddenly looking up, and glaring at him. “What do you want?”

He wanted to get out of here. To get _her _out of here, and to bring her away. To safety. Whether that was back to her world, or to his own, it didn’t matter anymore. He might not have physically been the one to hurt her, but he was the reason why she was here in the first place.

“I don’t want anything.” The way that Lila looked at him made him pause; made him think twice. He swallowed. Touched his throat. “I want you to believe that I’m not Astrid. Or to think about it.”

“How would I know?”

Nothing about the question surprised Kell. It made sense. Barely any time had passed since Lila first learned that this was even possible. There were ways that someone who was more familiar with magic might have been able to learn—a signature in the air that she could have looked out for, like a scent—but although Astrid smelled like her world and Kell carried airs of his, Lila wouldn’t have even thought to look at that. Why would she?

Just before Astrid had come to him, she’d gone to Lila. Dressed as him. Wearing his appearance, his skin. What had Astrid said to her, in Kell’s voice?

He knew what Astrid had done. Lila had said nothing to confirm it, and it was more the lack of words for just what happened that led Kell to his reach this conclusion. Kell could think of nothing else that Lila wouldn’t have hatefully spit in his face as an accusation, but she’d been vague. Besides, there was something just particularly cruel about coming to Lila as Kell to commit an act of violence that was by nature so intimate. It was different than hurting her in other ways that Lila had expected when she’d come to kill Astrid. They both had known were a possibility.

“You hurt her, didn’t you?” Kell asked.

Lila looked at him suspiciously, and Kell spread his hands in front of him. “I don’t believe that you would have gone down without a fight. Not for a minute. Whatever you did to her, it left a mark. Didn’t it?”

Lila touched her own face. “Yeah. I guess.”

“She’s dead now,” was all that Kell could think to say, the weight of the day pressing down on him. He wanted to be home, and away from the world. It wouldn’t be over when he returned to the palace, but at least right now he could let himself believe that it would be easier once he was. “I can show you what’s left of her.”

“What if it happened again?” Lila asked. “How would I know?”

“There are signs to look for,” he said, eventually. “Things that I could show you, if you wanted to know. But she’s dead now. I killed her. This isn’t something that’s happened to me before.”

“Except for with Rhy.”

Kell nodded, again exhausted. “Yeah. Except for that.”

He felt how Lila stared at him, then heard her derisive snort.

*

When he pulled away from her, Lila—hurt. It was like her legs had cracked out of her hips, and like the weight of Kell’s body had crushed her. What she felt between her legs was like fire, and what was deeper than that was raw, like an open wound. Kell, as he pulled up his trousers, was looking at her. She didn’t want to see his face; didn’t want to see that black eye staring pitilessly at her. But she didn’t want to look anywhere else, either. On his face was a thin line of his own blood, pale, that she had put there with hands that she couldn’t feel.

“There,” Kell said, kneeling next to her. His hand found her waist, a patch of bare skin where he could rest his hands. Red with blood. “You looked like you liked that, for a moment.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“You’ll find that it’s difficult to kill an _Antari_,” said Kell. “You don’t realise what you’re saying.”

But Lila did realise. It was the only thing that she knew, the rest of her body having fallen away.

“I’m going to kill you,” she repeated. Not moving—she couldn’t—but she didn’t have to. As sure as anything, Lila Bard knew what she would do. “I’ll shoot you.”

“It’ll take more than that to kill me,” Kell said coldly. “What will happen to you after this?”

“I’ll shoot you as many times as it takes,” she said, relieved to hear that her voice was still so even—so low—but shocked to hear it. “I won’t stop until you’re dead. And you will die.”

Then, Kell smiled. It didn’t look right on his face, and Lila tensed. To her great shame, she expected more pain. Kell leaned forward, so that his knee was just beside her rib. His hand fell gently on the side of her face, but she couldn’t stop himself from flinching when his skin touched hers.

“Rest now, Lila,” he said again. When she fell unconscious, it wasn’t with a crack to the head and white light in front of her eyes, but a heaviness in her skull and a floor that gave weight to the sudden weight of her. It was easier than falling asleep.

*

“I’ll be fine, you know,” Lila said as she pushed herself to her feet. For a moment Kell thought that she wouldn’t be able to make it, but his apprehensions were premature. She stood there, carefully slipping her knives back into place, but her balance was fine. Despite the blood, she looked okay. “This isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s not the first time that some freak tried something like that, either.”

“I know,” Kell said. “You’ve probably been in more fights that I have.”

Lila looked up to him, then shrugged. She said nothing; he’d thought she would, and felt something twist in him. And ridiculously, he wanted to apologise for it. For this. For bringing her here.

“Kell,” she said.

“What?”

“Are you ready?” she asked.

He didn’t know if he was. He wanted to leave, but didn’t know if he’d be able to take her with him again. And what kind of person would that make him, to have brought her here and let her get hurt… But the longer that he looked at her, the more that he knew it wasn’t the right answer. There was still a ferocity in her gaze, her eyes still set in such a way as she looked at him.

He wanted to ask if she trusted him to bring her home; what she’d do if he couldn’t.

“Your hand,” he said, and Lila stared down at it again. Like she’d forgotten about it.

“What about it?”

“Let me heal it,” he said, “before we go back.”

She looked at him warily, not making a move to offer it to him. Something twisted in him again, but Kell ignored it. He understood her reluctance. To get back to his world, he’d have to touch her—holding her close against him—and that had been a comfort on the way here. Right now, it really didn’t.

“If I was Astrid,” he said, “then I wouldn’t be able to heal you.”

“Don’t start guessing what I’m thinking, _Kell_,” she said, sticking her hand out in front of her. He looked down at it, then weakly wrapped one of his hands around hers. With his other hand, he began to reach for a knife, but before he could dig one out Lila had unsheathed one of hers and drove it into the back of his.

Kell flinched, but apart from that didn’t move. He let his own blood spill over his fingers, touching hers. Briefly, they stood just like that, before Kell finally spoke.

“_As Hasari_,” he murmured, looking at the knife dug into the back of his hand. He stole a glance up at Lila, who was watching just as intently. Waiting for the magic to work; to heal her. But there was more to that in her gaze.

“I don’t want to be here for another second,” Lila said, as Kell felt his magic start to work across her hand.

“Okay,” Kell said, weakly. He didn’t want to think of how far through her it would spread—about what injuries he would be healing. “Good.”

Although it wasn’t. But for the time being, it would have to do. _One adventure at a time_, she’d said to him before coming here, even if in this case that simply meant turning his back on everything that happened here.


End file.
